Review: Maestro (2023)

The principal success of Bradley Cooper’s artsy Maestro—about American conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein’s relationship with his wife, Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan)—is that it’s neither totally pretentious nor thematically unidimensional. Cooper’s approach could have easily resulted in a movie both false and flat.

Yes, there are more than a few big acting scenes with takes long enough to allow emotional changes on the faces of Cooper and Mulligan—scenes that are meant to reveal the hidden dimensions of the persons, to make some eyes wet in the audience, and to signal to the Academy that this is some mighty fine acting going on here (and the Academy seems to have taken notice). Amidst such emotive exhibitions, Cooper and Mulligan give compelling, if somewhat repetitive, performances. Cooper in particular seems to have developed a few features of Bernstein’s speech (the accent and tempo) and facial behaviour (such as his open-mouthed smile or depressed look) and then reiterates them depending on the scene. As well, as with many portrayals of famous historical figures (such as Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour, Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf in The Hours, etc.), Cooper’s make-up, while impressive as make-up, is left to convey too much of the character. I personally would have preferred if Cooper had stayed behind the camera (allowing him to clarify certain formal features of the film) and instead cast someone who looks more like Bernstein. But it’s a cliché for a talented actor-turned-director to take on this sort of project-plus-role in Hollywood, and so we cannot fault Cooper too much. He never comes close, however, to the raw intensity of moments in his superior A Star Is Born (2018).

Maestro contains more than a few formal flourishes, suggesting that the title is calling attention just as much to the film’s auteur as it is to its biographical subject. Cooper goes bigger with his camera here than before, such as with the early shot swinging from Bernstein up in the balcony, down through Carnegie Hall to the stage, and then back up to him, on the day he is going to conduct for the first time. Cooper smartly uses Bernstein’s music to score the film. For scenes showing Bernstein conducting, Cooper often uses long takes and dollies to capture the grandiose movements and emotional intensity of Bernstein’s style. There’s an intriguing surreal dance scene, in which Bernstein reveals his sexual attraction to men to Felicia through watching, and then participating in, a scene from his musical about sailors, On the Town.

While formally intriguing moments abound throughout Maestro, the overall governing formal strategies are incoherent. For instance, I do not understand the decision to use black-and-white for the first third of the film, other than to mirror the change in photography during Bernstein’s lifetime. In a way, the choice plays like a weak attempt to resemble a Christopher Nolan-esque formal strategy, such as the mixture of colour and black-and-white in Oppenheimer. Also like Nolan, Cooper experiments with violating conventional scene transitions, sometimes jumping to another time and place without clear indication to the audience, making for a bewildering first third of the film. I understand that the formal contradictions are likely meant to accent the theme of contradiction, but it bogs down the narrative and doesn’t seem to add all that much. Unlike Nolan, Cooper does not seem adept at combining formal innovation with narrative clarity.

It is also notable that although Maestro confronts Bernstein’s bisexuality head on, the film is not a simplistic celebration of Bernstein’s approach to life and love. At times, Bernstein comes across as selfish, destructive, and pretty terrible to the people around him. But we also see Bernstein’s genuine love for Felicia time and time again, even if he is never willing to (and the film never insists he) sacrifice his free-ranging sexual desires and affairs. Multiple times in the movie, Bernstein comments that he just loves people too much, and the film is intelligent enough to interrogate that claim to some extent.

Cooper seems reluctant to make Maestro simply an inspirational biopic with a simple message promoting sexual liberation. The main reason seems to be that Cooper has selected contradiction as the governing thematic and formal design for Maestro, highlighted not subtly with Bernstein’s own quotation that opens the film: “A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them.” Although too many characters, including Bernstein, repeat that he is a man of contradictions, Cooper’s approach makes for an occasionally brilliant, occasionally intriguing, occasionally pretentious, occasionally awkward, unconventional in ways and conventional in others, biopic.

In the end, what is Maestro saying? I’m not sure. It’s asking questions, I guess, and that’s fine. I’m far more fond of Baz Luhrmann’s recent Elvis biopic, which was more conventional in some ways and yet made me see the whole domain of pop music differently. Maestro reveals little about Bernstein’s professional life, instead revealing aspects of the personal side, but never in a fully satisfactory way. I don’t feel like I understand the composer or conductor or Broadway shows or classical music any better. And that’s frustrating when your movie is called Maestro and is about one of the major figures in American music of the 20th century. That’s provocative, but not in a good way.

6 out of 10

Maestro (2023, USA)

Directed by Bradley Cooper; screenplay by Bradley Cooper and Josh Singer; starring Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan.

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